Brunch vs stealjs

According to speed benchmarks, Brunch is one of the fastest tools around for compiling files. According to the authors of Brunch the reason behind this speed is that it recompiles only the changes that were made to an app and performs extensive caching of the app's code.

After installing Brunch the next step is to load a skeleton from git.io/skeletons. This step is as easy as installing another plugin from the npm registry, just point Brunch to the path of the required skeleton/generator then wait for it to work out its magic. Next, run brunch build then wait for a second or two and voila! the project is ready.

Brunch's config files can be extremely small compared to other alternatives. The fact that brunch also allows you to chose from a number of generators also lowers the configuration time considerably.

Brunch automatically produces a source map for all javascript files and CSS stylesheets whenever it minifies an app's resources. This little feature is extremely helpful when debugging is required at the client end.

StealJS has support for AMD, CJS and ES6 module types.

StealJS can also load CSS and LESS files in addition to JavaScript modules.

StealJS supports using all three module types, even in the same file.

StealJs supports ES6 modules and their import and export methods without having to compile them to CommonJS require.

StealJS supports transpiling of ES6 code to ES5

Source maps allow for easier debugging, because they allow you to find the problems within the origin files instead of the output file.

Because StealJS allows you to use the same require() function as node.js, you can easily share modules between the client-side and server-side.

Using StelaJS opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.